2017 Family Planning Market Report has been released

6th November 2017

As the family planning (FP) community continues to face funding challenges and uncertainty, the future of the FP commodity market may be under threat.

Analysis from the recently published 2017 Family Planning Market Report has revealed a sharp market value decline of 28 percent from 2015 to 2016 in the public and social sectors of the 69 FP2020 focus countries, after remaining relatively stable since 2011. The report – jointly produced by the Clinton Health Access Initiative and the Reproductive Health Supplies Coalition – suggests that the value decrease was caused by a substantial decline in shipment volumes particularly among injectables and oral contraceptive pills (combined and progestin only) and was not attributed to any pricing changes. While the shift towards long-acting methods driven by the growth of implants helped offset some of the declines in implied couple years of protection shipped, it is still the lowest the market has seen in six years. Further, the donor-funded market, analyzed as a subset of the public and social sector market, has seen a corresponding decline in donor-funded shipments from 2015 to 2016.

The report hypothesizes several potential reasons to explain the value decline from 2015 to 2016 including: volumes shifting towards local and regional suppliers not participating in the report and procurement pattern fluctuations. However, the concern is a third possibility: the decline in donor spending implied by decreased donor-funded shipments may have led to a decline in total public sector procurement where governments and other procurers did not sufficiently cover the shortfall, potentially impacting the number of users on modern methods of contraception.

The trend raises further concerns when set against the current funding landscape. RHSC’s 2016 Global Contraceptive Commodity Gap Analysis has identified significant funding gaps based on existing family planning spending levels. In addition, there is continued uncertainty with regard to the future of the U.S. government’s financial commitment to family planning. Should the funding challenges remain unaddressed, there could be a decline in the family planning commodity market, although future data and further analyses are needed to confirm this trend.

Register for the webinar on November 30th at 9 AM EST where the report’s findings and hypotheses for the market decline will be further discussed.

The 2017 Family Planning Market Report, now in its third iteration, continues to provide the community with the most comprehensive and reliable look into the public and social sectors of the family planning procurement market across the 69 FP2020 focus countries. The 2017 report features an increased supplier participation, with all of last year’s 13 suppliers choosing to continue their participation, along with one new supplier. In addition, the report provides an initial set of hypotheses developed through consultations with key suppliers and community stakeholders to explain the significant market value decline seen from 2015 to 2016.

The report is a product of the Global Markets Visibility Project, produced with support from the Reproductive Health Supplies Coalition, and provides insightful and strategic outputs for donors, Ministries of Health (MoH), implementing organizations, and suppliers to develop and implement more effective strategies aimed at ensuring that an additional 120 million women in the world’s 69 poorest countries have access to family planning products and services by 2020. We thank the 14 suppliers for their important contribution in this initiative and DFID for the funding to undertake this project.